Exit the Bookninja

When I moved back to Toronto in the summer of 2003, after several years abroad in New York and Italy, I discovered that most of my comrades and compatriots, a crew of young writers, editors and assorted literary types I used to argue about books with in various pubs and cafés around town, had scattered — victims of marriages, careers, suburbs or just plain old-fashioned introversion. People were sticking close to home and home was often no longer Toronto.

When I moved back to Toronto in the summer of 2003, after several years abroad in New York and Italy, I discovered that most of my comrades and compatriots, a crew of young writers, editors and assorted literary types I used to argue about books with in various pubs and cafés around town, had scattered — victims of marriages, careers, suburbs or just plain old-fashioned introversion. People were sticking close to home and home was often no longer Toronto.

A few of us tried to start a mailing list, where we could discuss and argue about the same literary issues, alerting each other to great books and damning the weak ones with curses, but mailing lists are notoriously hard to maintain because, frankly, who wants all that email?

Along with one of my best friends, novelist Peter Darbyshire, I decided to create a website for our group of friends to visit. We came up with a silly name, designed a logo and site, posted some links to articles along with our usual saucy commentary, and added an area for discussion. The initial announcement that we’d launched a website probably went out to 25 people. Within two months, several hundred people were visiting the site, which we’d dubbed Bookninja. Within two years, traffic had grown to thousands.

Back when we started, we couldn’t even get publishers to send us review copies — no one really knew what a “book blog” was. (At the turn of the millennium, blogs were not common fodder for news; there was a very personal, clubby feel about them. People who had found a great blog were torn between hoarding it for themselves and crowing to the rest of the world about this strange new way of consuming information.) But then Bookninja started making things happen. Regular commentors from our forums started getting jobs writing reviews for newspapers and magazines, stories we broke started getting mainstream press attention, people started talking about our site at parties. We even started to help sell books. (We ran a feature called the Inverse Omnibus Review, where instead of one reviewer looking at two or three books, we had two or three reviewers concentrate on one book in a roundtable discussion. One of the first books featured was Derek McCormack’s deeply weird novella The Haunted Hillbilly. We were contacted by ultra-cool U.S. punk publisher Soft Skull Press, who subsequently published McCormack in the States.) We also ran contests — to write acerbic haikus, come up with cartoon captions or redesign literary book covers as more sellable genres; this last was so successful it was covered and had images excerpted by The Guardian and The New York Times.

Eventually, even literary celebrities started showing up. After I hosted Irish novelist Roddy Doyle at a book signing in Ontario, he started reading Bookninja, and would tell people it was one of three sites he read daily. After someone dissed one of her authors in the comments, über-agent Anne McDermid chimed in to rebut. Margaret Atwood stopped me at a book event and said, “Oh! So YOU’RE the Bookninja!” and then proceeded to give me some advice on how to better skewer Stephen Harper on his commitment to the arts. What began as a virtual gathering place for friends had gone viral.

At its peak, Bookninja’s unique brand of comedic literary commentary reached more than 10,000 people a day. It seemed like everyone in the publishing industry, from writers to editors to publicists to librarians, was reading Bookninja. We were mentioned, quoted and profiled in newspapers and magazines not just in Canada but around the world. I was invited to speak at conferences. Publishers lined up around the block to get their books mentioned on the site — the number of free review copies got so overwhelming that I held parties at my house during which I’d put out Rubbermaid tubs full of books and demand people leave with at least three or four.

During this time, Bookninja developed a reputation for taking the piss out of the publishing world, whether it be lambasting authors, taking jabs at corporate publishers or skewering poetic pretence. Though mostly everyone knew it was in good fun, it wasn’t always a love-in. At several points, Bookninja became the nexus for nasty battles between some of the writing world’s biggest personalities and their detractors. There was more chopping of tall poppies than in an Afghanistan grow-op. The worst was the conflict of interest scandal involving the young poet Jacob Scheier, who had the bad (or good) luck of having a close family friend, mentor and poetic collaborator on the jury that awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. The poor fellow was skewered for weeks by our commentators, even though the questionable moral choices that led to the win weren’t his.

Peter and I ran the site together for several years, but as the readership mounted, so too did the expectation. There were more books to read than ever. We had to closely monitor the increasingly vitriolic comments section for bullying and libel, less we find a lawsuit on our hands. We’d launched a Bookninja magazine, which included original reviews, interviews and essays, thereby adding to the workload. It was an exciting place to visit, but for those of us running it, the pressure was on. If I was late posting the links, I’d get angry emails from readers asking why there’d been a delay. “Listen, buddy,” I wanted to write back, “It’s a thing we do for FREE in our SPARE TIME!” But, of course, that was the problem — we ran the site around our other work and obligations. A third friend, the writer Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, had joined us to run the magazine and alleviate the workload, but it was just too much. Peter quit to devote more time to his own writing. Eventually, Kathryn left, too, and it was just me. It was kind of like we’d lost two thirds of a street performance troupe and were left with just one crazy guy yelling on the corner.

Through sheer will, and what’s likely undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder, I kept the blog running until last year, but forces in my own life conspired against me: children, jobs, houses, a divorce. I barely had time for the necessities, much less waxing wise about books. Plus, there was this little thing I used to do called “my own writing.” Wasn’t I supposed to be working on a novel? My fellow Ninjas had quit to concentrate on their own books; maybe I should too?

So I did.

Over the years, I’d been in talks with various bigshots about buying the site, but the problem with selling a brand like Bookninja is that the brand is, well, me. So, a year ago Saturday, I posted one last time. There was no goodbye message. No real explanation of why I was calling it quits. To the readers, it must have seemed like the site went out with a whimper, but it was a shocking relief to me.

New book blogs emerged in the years between the rise and fall of Bookninja. Many of them are local, genre or concept specific, offering a specificity we couldn’t match. The big newspapers and magazines started blogs of their own, a few of which were actually good. Most of these seem to rely on longer-form writing, whereas Bookninja relied on links and jokes. Still, people seemed to be reading these more and more. Book blogs no longer have to beg publishers for attention; publicists now actively court blogs — the multi-city book tour has been replaced by the multi-site “blog tour.” Bookninja was still well-read, but it wasn’t really “needed” like it once was. The void it had filled was no longer a void.

In the end, it was a good run, and lots of people had fun. A successful poet in Canada can count on between 500 and 750 readers over the life of a book; a mid-list novelist doesn’t get many more. My brand of literary stand-up comedy was earning thousands and thousands of readers each day. It wasn’t translating to sales at the till (it’s poetry, people, come on), but it certainly made me feel good at parties when people came up to say hi. Do I miss it? Sometimes. But mostly not. To paraphrase The Doors when they were told they’d not be invited back on The Ed Sullivan Show: Hey, man, I was the Bookninja.

• George Murray edited Bookninja from 2003 to 2011. His sixth book is Whiteout, available this April from ECW.

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